Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

HIERARCHY

Trying to understand how and why a relationship develops is surely an endless task, with so many possibilities and perspectives. I find that I keep going back to our personalities and how different we are. It’s funny, because in the beginning those differences made it feel like we were creating a stronger-than-the-individual unit, that we were filling in what we were each lacking individually. I wonder if, ultimately, we just didn’t have the skills or ability to subjugate our own needs, they were just too fundamental to be overcome. Was our inability to be our true selves within this relationship what pulled us apart? Did we each need to make or expect too many concessions to create a healthy relationship?

My way to combat his decisiveness and imperviousness was to become as closed as he was. If I could not talk him into seeing or recognizing the validity of my point of view—ever, if his opinion was the only valid opinion, then perhaps the only way I could survive without becoming totally submissive was to fight back, absoluteness against absoluteness, or in my case, my silence against his torrent of words. I was changing so I would not have to respond to the charge that I was wrong, always. The whole rhythm of the relationship became discordant.

And so I stopped discussing things with him. If his opinions were the only ones he would hear and were the only ones on which to base a decision that affected both of us and eventually the family, well, then I would not share the decision-making process with him (like him). It’s not that I was aware that I was doing this until much later, until our relationship had already disintegrated. It was only then, too, that it occurred to me that the strong-mindedness and determination that I had so admired in him initially were the very reason for my utter disaffection with him, his treatment of me and our relationship.

I changed over the course of our 24-year relationship, I don’t think that he did, that, too, holds the seeds of our destruction.

Change leader change. Change leader change. That was a chant we would call out when playing ‘Follow the Leader,’ unfortunately, the leader never changed, and the follower did. Or if he did, not in a way that would help save our marriage.

PUT ME ON A PEDESTAL, PLEASE

I heard somewhere that for a marriage to work the woman must be put on a pedestal. I don’t know where that comes from, but it seems to have some truth to it. What does it mean to be put on a pedestal? A man should respect you, adore you, serve you, and want to make you happy. Is there more? For me that would have been enough. The problem was that I put him on a pedestal. I thought that I had struck it ‘rich’ with my husband; I thought that I was the one who married the pick of the litter, that he was the best, the smartest and the most likely to succeed. I felt for my friends and their laid-back husbands; I thought that my husband was The One. Unfortunately, so did he; I’m not sure if I was a competitor, and if so, for how long. Maybe it would have worked if both of us had stayed on those pedestals.

His nine-to-nine days never bothered me; I admired his dedication and workaholicness. It didn’t seem to predict any chinks in the relationship in the future. Wasn’t the type-A personality an indicator of future success, an indication that this man would be able to take care of me and my children. Was something wrong with thinking like that? I was working, I had goals for myself, but they were in the writing field, in the saving the world field, so why shouldn’t I respect a husband who would take care of the other side of things. It’s not that I was dependent, I took care of the bills, I wasn’t a tortured artist, I didn’t take advantage of anyone, after all I worked while he went to law school and then after. I thought we were a team, yin-yanging each other. He even acknowledged that I opened up horizons and perspectives that he hadn’t perceived before. So, where was the imbalance, where were the signs that this was a relationship heading for the brink? I thought I was acknowledged for what I thought and believed in, and he was respected for what he was doing and what he wanted to accomplish. Were we both living with illusions of our own making?

Did I put too much emphasis on his role outside of the home and, because of his success there, did I jealously try to prevent him from being as successful and commanding at home. Was my weakness outside, or rather my not achieving any of my goals, the reason I tried to hold onto the home base? I was contradicting myself, because while I was demanding that I not be solely responsible for the home, I was also demanding absolute authority in the home. Confusing for both of us, this blending of roles. The principle of ‘having it all’ did not recognize the difficulty it would engender at home, that a person could not always jockey for position at the top.

When did I get knocked off the pedestal? When did he get knocked off? Did he eventually tire of the silence of my non-compliance? Did he notice that I lost the glimmer in my eye when I saw him?